Monthly Archives: September 2013

Earlier this week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) spoke for 21 consecutive hours on the Senate floor. The purpose of his filibuster was to cause the Senate to defund the Obamacare law as the price of passing a new “debt ceiling” law to prevent a government shutdown. The Senate was unimpressed. Obamacare will be funded, and the “debt ceiling” law will (eventually) be passed with or without Senator Cruz’s support.

The Washington Times published an article entitled “As Sen. Ted Cruz gives a long speech, Treasury gets short on funding” which focused on the Cruz filibuster, but also touched on the debt limit issue. According to that article,

“The Treasury Department said Wednesday that it has less than a month’s worth of room to maneuver before it hits the debt limit, dropping yet another major fiscal deadline in the lap of a Congress already stymied over the annual spending bills.”

Frank Hollenbeck, PhD, teaches at the International University of Geneva. He recently wrote an article entitled “Fear the Boom, Not the Bust” for Mises Daily.

In that article, Mr. Hollenbeck described the modern “boom-and-bust” business cycle. Most people celebrate the “boom” when the economy is running hot and everyone seems to prosper. Most people fear the “bust” (recession or depression) when we’re almost all suffering from diminished incomes.

However, Dr. Hollenbeck argues that the irrational excesses of the booms cause the painful corrections in the busts. Thus, because the booms cause the busts, we should be more afraid of the booms and less afraid of the busts.

I wrote this article last week. It deals with the Federal Reserves decision on September 18th to not begin to “taper” QE easing injections of cash into our economy. I should’ve published this article last week; it would’ve been more timely and more relevant. However, it was lost in the hopper, so I’m only getting around to it now.

If you’re still interested in the Fed’s “tapering” issue, this article may worth your time. If you’re no longer interested in “tapering,” you could give it a pass.

• I’m not an attorney, but for twelve years, I edited and published a magazine called the “AntiShyster” that focused on the law and judicial system. As a result of studying all that “legalese,” I became a dangerous man because:

Some people say our circumstances are hopeless. We are overpowered by superior government forces and condemned to defeat by our own ignorance and apathy.

Others say that We the People are the 800-pound gorilla, things are not hopeless, and we can take this country back any time we decide to all stand up at the same time. I subscribe to this second perspective. So does Ron Paul. So do a lot of other Americans, and their numbers are growing.

I haven’t worked a garden since I was a kid. Nevertheless, the way the world is running, I can’t help thinking that we may soon see a day when our survival may depend on our ability to grow our own food.

The following video is about “high-performance” gardening and makes a number of compelling arguments. I.e., one key to personal heath is to eat plants that are highly nutritious. A plant’s nutritional value depends on the biological health of the soil in which the plant grows It’s not enough to raise plants in an environment that merely provides sufficient minerals but is otherwise sterile. The key to growing nutritional plants is to grow them in a soil that has a strong microbial environment.

The following video reveals that modern pesticides not only kill insects that might attack our plants, but also sterilize and effectively kill the microbes in the soil. Likewise, modern fertilizers consist of chemical “salts” that may provide minerals to plants,but also tend to kill the soil’s microbes. Thus, the result of using modern pesticides and fertilizers may be a reduced nutritional quality in the plants we eat.

This video presents alternatives that are claimed to produce food that is greater in both nutritional content and quantity than can normally be produced with conventional pesticides and fertilizers. One of the video’s implications is that, by using the methods advocated, you can grow several times as much food per square foot as compared to using conventional methods based on pesticides and fertilizers. Thus, the “high-performance” label implies that if it would ordinarily take a 1/2 acre garden to feed you and your family, by means of these “high-performance” methods, you might be able to feed your family with a garden that’s only 1/8th acre. A relatively small greenhouse might provide a lot of food. That’s good news for people who have relatively small yards or limited access to soil.